Comcast's Wireless Service Will Charge You More To Stream HD Video
from the arbitrary-constructs dept
A few years back, wireless carriers began flirting with a new idea: throttling all video by default, then charging you additional money if you wanted to view video as actually intended. You'll probably recall that T-Mobile spearheaded this effort, and wasn't particularly honest about what it was doing. You might also recall that Sprint began throttling all video to 1.5 Mbps, all games to speeds "up to 2 Mbps" and all music streams to speeds "up to 500 Kbps." Fortunately for you, you could avoid dealing with this arbitrary restrictions if you were willing to pay Sprint an additional $25 per month:
"This plan provides a premium quality mobile streaming experience with HD streaming videos at up to 1080p+, HD music streaming at up to 1.5 Mbps and streaming gaming at up to 8 Mbps."
Reddit users note that Comcast is now following suit for its own Xfinity Mobile wireless service. The service leans primarily on Comcast's network of WiFi hotspots and Verizon's cellular network, promising users "unlimited" data for $45 per line (plus various fees). As is usually the case in wireless, Comcast's definition of "unlimited" means around 20 GB, after which your connection is throttled to 1.5 Mbps download and 750 Kbps upload. Now, according to Reddit users, the company has also started throttling video on this service back to 480p, with plans to begin charging you more if you want actual HD:
"To help you conserve data, we've established 480p as the standard resolution for streaming video through cellular data. This can help you save money if you pay By the Gig and take longer to reach the 20 GB threshold if you have the Unlimited data option. Later this year, 720p video over cellular data will be available as a fee-based option with your service. In the meantime, you can request it on an interim basis at no charge.
In other words, by "unlimited" Comcast really means 20 GB on a connection incapable of delivering HD video unless you pay more money. As an added, new restriction, Comcast is also now throttling all tethered hotspots on these "unlimited" connections to 600 kbps--unless you sign up for the company's pay per gigabyte option at a whopping $12 per gigabyte. This is, apparently, Comcast's version of what it looks like when you try and disrupt and compete with the broader wireless industry.
On its face this isn't the end of the world. On a small mobile phone screen, the difference between 480p and 720p will likely be unnoticable to many users. It's the precedent that's being set that's more troubling. For one, this continues to be a bastardization of the term "unlimited," a word the telecom sector has abused for the better part of the last decade without learning any real lessons. And with net neutrality rules now on the cutting room floor, throttling video, music and games (unless you pay more) isn't too far of a leap from theoretical scenarios like this one:
Again, with a net neutrality court challenge looming, ISPs are going to try and be on their best behavior to avoid providing any ammunition to the opposition. But with anti-competitiveness in their marrow, they're going to find it irresistible to try and push the envelope when it comes to creative new ways to raise rates on the end user. On the surface many of these efforts may not seem all that terrible, but like the boiling frog metaphor these baby steps will all cumulatively result in a decidedly-unpleasant online experience, and which arbitrary limits and caveats we're willing to accept is going to matter over the longer haul.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: competition, net neutrality, streaming, throttling, unlimited
Companies: comcast
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
There's a difference between the minority of those who provide Internet service -- the Broadband ISPs, and the rest of us.ISPs are EVERY SINGLE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER, a majority of which favor net neutrality, work hard to establish industry standards, and have a positive reputation in the community. Sonic.net is one of the prime examples of such. My company in Arizona is another.
Broadband providers of Internet Service like Comcast, Cox, AT&T, Charter, are those who work hard to lobby Congress and the FCC to remove restrictions, don't understand unlimited, and lie artfully in every filing.
If you are going to chastise Comcast for not understanding the word "unlimited" please apply the same to yourself for not understanding "ISP" and applying your comments to "ISPs" when you mean Broadband (or cable) providers.
Ehud Gavron
(And yes, I support net neutrality, settlment-free peering, unlimited means unmetered+unfiltered+unlimited etc. and by "support" I mean we do it and we don't charge for it!!!)
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
BDP
Big Dumb Pipes.
When are we gonna get em?
No time soon...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Until then... everything it nothing more than lip service to an ideal no one intends on actually doing anything about.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Last mile infrastructure
The solution to a monopoly is not to steal everything from the private sector and give it to the "public" (lol, because "public" really means the government, not the people) but to foster the creation of competition.
o Allow other companies to use the poles, paying a fair and market price to do so
o Allow other companies to ride the wires (this was done in the late 90s/early 00s and was called Unbundled Network Element) for a fair and market price. This is what propelled DSL companies that had no last-mile wiring to success (Covad, Northpoint, and others)
Competition is the key to making a successful consumer win in a free market. Nationalizing property is 180 degrees the wrong way.
Ehud
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Netflix had been in a battle with Verizon that involved it PAYING for the equipment that would solve the connectivity woes Verizon customers were suffering when using it (and other services, there were problems with online games as well for instance). At the time the equipment cost 25k USD and acquiring it would make it better for Verizon customers to use any service including Netflix. Verizon was dragging its collective feet while breathlessly arguing that they needed to impose throttling and caps because Netflix users were gobbling up so much capacity.
When the rules went into effect and could be enforced the dispute suddenly solved itself. So yeas, the monopoly can be controlled. And since dismantling it is kind of hard because it's a natural monopoly Wheeler took the right path into controlling them. Exactly what Pai is dismantling.
Of course you'll never admit you are full of shit but facts are facts, deal with it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
I am correct on a factual level no matter how you slice the pie. Whether NN benefits the customer or not is a non-sequitor to my comment.
As long as you do nothing about the 800 pound gorilla that is the monopolies in the room then you are doing nothing more than weak sauce attacks on the problem itself, which is not exactly a surprise given how easy it is to keep you fooled.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yes. Because it's a fucking natural monopoly. Laying new infra-structure is expensive enough that you don't see anybody trying their luck there and even when the deep pocketed try to they face another face of the problem that needs to be tackled which is the regulatory capture (which has nothing to do with the regulations put in place in 2015 by the way).
Sure you have to deal with the monopoly and for that you need to combat such regulatory capture but you can also rein them in with regulations. We have a strictly regulated environment in Europe and it works wonders. Another way is going with municipal broadband because the government has enough money to deal with the steep capital costs and there are multiple success cases out there. Of course you also need to dismantle some regulatory capture in some places as well. But again, it's an effort that doesn't invalidate the need for good NN rules.
You are hopeless. Please enlighten us on how to dismantle this monopoly. Multiple people have asked and you simply don't answer. I suspect you can't answer that so it's easier to avoid the question, right? The best I've seen from you were incoherent babbling on how wise you are because regulations are bad.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
How do they know?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How do they know?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How do they know?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
advert
What does it mean in the at&t advert when they state "over 150 websites". then, for a higher price, "even more websites and this time over 200. Etc.
Being a Brit and not having to understand what it means, I don't. It's not obvious either. Anyone care to enlighten me. Thanks
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: advert
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: advert
Thanks Joe, a parody explains it. I was imagining walled gardens.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: advert
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: advert
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: advert
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: advert
Where are they actually doing this? I haven't seen any actual ISP charging for different websites.
Sure, they may want/need to charge more for certain kinds of service, but then, why should a person (such as my 90+ year old parents) who only looks at websites (which require a very simple connections) pay the same as the people who want streaming connections, which are more expensive to manage?
I don't have a problem with charging more for different types of service. To me, the biggest problem is calling it "unlimited" when it's really not.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: advert
So it makes little difference whether the user is an occasional user or a heavy user.
As for charging for different websites, what do you think all this zero rating is about? It gives the ISPs content service an advantage, and can be used as a lever to extract money from the Likes of Netflix if they want the delivery of streams to be such that they can keep their customers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: advert
Streaming requires a constant connection, which requires much more overhead to manage, provide resilience, routing, etc.
And I ask again, where are ISPs charging a different cost to visit one web page over another? That's what this parody is implying.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: advert
Almost all Internet connections these days are persistent, or hadn't you noticed that little fact.
Note that allowing some streams not to count towards a data cap, while others do is limiting the use of some sites unless a person pays heavily for overage charges. It also demonstrates that capacity is not the problem, while cord cutting and subscribing to streams where the ISP does not make the content providers profit is a problem to the ISP.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: advert
If loading a network packet for an email message or web page takes 10 seconds, it's annoying but not a deal breaker. If streaming packets are delayed by 1/100th of a second, it starts becoming an issue. That's huge orders of magnitude that must be monitored & managed differently, different skill sets, etc.
"Note that allowing some streams not to count towards a data cap, while others do is limiting the use of some sites unless a person pays heavily for overage charges. "
Again, you're confusing streaming with other connection types. I specifically said web pages, and you mention streams.
Also, your statement that this "demonstrates capacity isn't a problem" is a conclusion not supported by the facts you've presented. Pricing of traffic is one method to manage demand, and is, in fact, one of the methods to manage capacity. It's used in many different fields for capacity management - for example, back in the POTS/home phone days, certain phone calls were more expensive during the day than at night. Even wireless companies charged different fees during high demand times than lower demand times.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lock in your price for 12 months
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Tribalism is every bit as destructive as racism... a lesson they have yet to learn.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Honestly I am ready to go back to a flip phone. Sure I want to use all my data but the task of monitoring/worrying about it makes the whole experience not worth it and "unlimited" plans are still to expensive.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Comcast Wireless
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Comcast Wireless
They complain about how slow their wifi is during the evening hours. When they call into Comcast, Cocmast tries to fix it by upping their price tier.
It took some explaining by a few users on our neighborhood group that Comcast was letting too many simultaneous connected devices onto their router, slowing everything down. When they switched to a cheap router they bought off of Amazon, suddenly their speed jumped significantly.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
480p "good enough for mobile"
This is like saying gaming through a postage stamp is plenty. Things look *awful* on 720p, let alone 480p when the average mobile screen is 1080p or above (many are 2k/4k).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Question: is network bandwidth unlimited or not?
Possible answers:
Yes: then Comcast is selling a legitimate scarcity = right in line with Techdirt principle.
No: you're just plain crazy.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Question: is network bandwidth unlimited or not?
Question: are you overselling your capacity? Are you engaging in false advertisement when selling a determined speed? Are you lying? (By you I mean Comcast).
If you have a congestion problem then throttle everybody. And clearly state it when selling further.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
ISPs are EVERY SINGLE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER, a majority of which favor net neutrality, work hard to establish industry standards, and have a positive reputation in the community. Sonic.net is one of the prime examples of such. My company in Arizona is another.
Broadband providers of Internet Service like Comcast, Cox, AT&T, Charter, are those who work hard to lobby Congress and the FCC to remove restrictions, don't understand unlimited, and lie artfully in every filing.
If you are going to chastise Comcast for not understanding the word "unlimited" please apply the same to yourself for not understanding "ISP" and applying your comments to "ISPs" when you mean Broadband (or cable) providers.
Ehud Gavron
(And yes, I support net neutrality, settlment-free peering, unlimited means unmetered+unfiltered+unlimited etc. and by "support" I mean we do it and we don't charge for it!!!)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
Now I know every member in WISPa was not in support of this move, but I also know some very vocal members that supported it as well.
My hope is when the lawsuits start rolling out, we'll find out exactly who is screwing their customers and I hope it isn't just a slap on the wrist this time. I'm out of the broadband/ISP business now and run a few colocation buildings now, but I understand where you are coming from. Not every ISP is horrible, but the barrier to entry is so high in most areas that it's usually just 1 or 2 choices at most and usually that's been the Telco and a legacy CableCo which are apart of the companies you named.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
The distinction here is... what, exactly? That DSL (used by Sonic.net) is technically baseband? But then we're not even talking about cable providers, we're talking about wireless providers (admittedly, they've tried quite hard not to have their products confused with "real" internet connections). So, by what definition is AT&T a "Broadband" provider but Sonic isn't?
Maybe it would be more useful to call them the American internet service cartel/oligopoly, if that's what we mean. Or incumbents, or giant ISPs.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
When TechDirt says "ISPs do this REALLY BAD BEHAVIOR" he paints all Internet Service Providers with this broad brush. What should be done is to only paint the "Bad Guys", those being part of the duopoly of Telco+CATV providers.
Similarly ILEC doesn't include the CATV provider, and "giant ISPs" include lots of companies that have a huge geo-footprint and yet aren't part of that Telco+CATV duopoly.
Precise language is generally important when reporting on news, exhorting people to action, and seeking to achieve education of the reader and enlightenment with an end to action.
To that end, so long as there is a distinction between the tens of thousands of ISPs and the less than 100 Telco+CATV Broadband Providers, it is worth making the distinction.
Ehud
P.S. AT&T is a broadband provider by nature of having charters and custom agreements with municipalities giving them a monopoly on their service in that area. Sonic builds its own infrastructure to compete with the existing T+C brands.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Broadband service providers are a subset of ISPs
So, what are you proposing as the term to use? "Bad guys"? "Duopoly"? Certainly not "broadband providers", which would include Sonic and perhaps your company (linguistic precision demands you don't assign a meaning contrary to the normally-understood one—which for "broadband" is approximated by the FCC's definition).
BTW, don't confuse "incumbent", an ordinary English word, with "ILEC", a precise telephone company term.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Is this the 'Idiot in a hurry' test as applied to articles?
When TechDirt says "ISPs do this REALLY BAD BEHAVIOR" he paints all Internet Service Providers with this broad brush. What should be done is to only paint the "Bad Guys", those being part of the duopoly of Telco+CATV providers.
I'm pretty sure the only one getting confused by that is you, with most people understanding that when an article comes out slamming ISP's by name for dodgy behavior it doesn't mean every ISP in general, no exceptions. The article was providing the names of the ISP's in question right until the end, I rather doubt many people are going to make the jump from 'specific ISP's' to 'every ISP ever' just because it didn't name them every single time.
The companies listed are ISP's(regardless of what else they might be in addition to that), and they are doing those things. You say yours doesn't? Great, then the article wasn't talking about you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Is this the 'Idiot in a hurry' test as applied to articles?
> most people understanding...
> I rather doubt...
Thanks for sharing YOUR opinion about what you are sure about, what you doubt, and your characterization of the rest of the opinions of the reading populace.
Thank you for putting your name to your opinions :)
E
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Like for like
Alrighty then.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Like for like
So, no, I don't think a debate on opinions will yield much. Effectively you're ok with Karl calling out all ISPs but then naming a few and think that's ok, and I don't.
If only Congress could have multiple opinions and a civil discourse.
E
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Like for like
Effectively you're ok with Karl calling out all ISPs but then naming a few and think that's ok, and I don't.
Yes, I am okay with that, because I place more value on the intelligence of those reading the articles than you seem to.
While I grant that it's possible that a minority may read articles like this and jump to 'all ISP's will do this', I expect most will see the myriad of examples where specific ISPs are named and their actions listed and understand that those ISPs are the ones being discussed on the occasion that a name isn't specifically provided.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
assumptions and assholes
What are speeds like when you minimize their spying on you?
...and what the hell is wrong with TD for not even questioning that? DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ANYONE WHO CHOOSES TO PROTECT THEIR PRIVACY SHOULD BE THE TOPIC. Are a significant portion of TD readers so technically incompetent and ill-informed as to NOT be using a VPN? Jeaze, whose fault is that? Who's the asshole here? Me? Sure maybe, but am I the only one?
This genuinely comes off as advertising to me- doesn't matter how much you criticize, your listing product offerings- and failing to even mention the most important thing- that the only way they are able to throttle is by spying so they know WHAT/HOW to throttle...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]